The present invention relates to the limiting of content delivery to individual recipients, particularly regarding the delivery of content over a communications network environment such as the world wide web. The delivered content may consist of any type of data format, or collection of formats that is typically used on the world wide web. Content comes in many forms, including text, graphics, audio, video, multimedia, etc. In particular, content used as online advertising is of interest. Generally, an online advertisement is displayed to an individual, i.e. a consumer, while the individual views material or uses functionality provided by a publisher on a communications network environment. A specific online advertisement is often displayed multiple times to a particular user. The present invention allows limiting the number of times a particular ad is seen by a user, also called the frequency capping. This frequency capping is independent of the location, web address, domain name or publisher, which is displaying the online ad. Frequency capping is achieved across publishers either per ad or per ad campaign if multiple ads are grouped into a campaign.
The proliferation of the Internet and world wide web (hereinafter “web”) has created a great demand for effective content. After all, content is the key element that drives people to a website. Content comes in many forms, including text, graphics, audio, video, multimedia, etc. Numerous applications exist where content is being served over the web to clients.
In the web environment, content is typically embedded “indirectly” in web pages downloaded from a host server to a client (hereinafter “browser”). In particular, the web page will generally include references to content using uniform resource locators (URL) that tell the browser where to retrieve the content. The browser, upon analyzing the web page, will send a request out to the identified location, and the content will be returned and inserted in the web page at a predetermined location. During the requesting of this content the browser can send a message along to the server, which contains data that was previously sent to the browser from that server. This message is called a “cookie” and all major and most minor browser implementations support this cookie mechanism. This cookie mechanism is a useful tool in the process of accumulating statistical data about the delivered content.
Often, the content will reside on a third-party content server. For advertising content it is in many cases much more efficient to store content on a 3rd party content server, particularly because in this case the 3rd party content server (hereinafter “ad server”) can accumulate statistics on the delivered ad independently of the web site publisher (hereinafter “publisher”) and across multiple publishers. These statistics typically include the number of times the ad was delivered, called impressions, and the number of times the ad was acted upon, e.g. how many times the ad was “clicked”. Depending on the format of the ad many other types of statistics can be accumulated by the ad server. A “publisher” may be an individual entity that publishes a web site, an entity that publishes content that is used within multiple web sites, such as ad networks, or any other entity that has authority over content published within web sites.
Current research strongly suggests that the effectiveness of an online ad is related to the number of times a particular user is exposed to the ad, also called the frequency of the ad. While it is usually desirable to show an ad more than once to a particular user it is also desirable to limit the number of times the user can see the ad. In other words it is desirable to apply frequency capping to an ad. Currently some publishers offer advertisers the ability to frequency cap ads shown on their web site, but this ability is limited to only that web site and cannot be applied to other publishers, which may also show the ad. While each publisher may frequency cap the ad the overall result regarding the frequency capping of the ad across multiple publishers will be poor if the publishers have an overlap in their visitor base.
Since an ad server already delivers ads across publishers and accumulates statistics, the present invention extends its functionality to offer frequency capping across publishers per ad or per ad campaign or per any other criteria, which could be used to decide on limiting the content delivery. A method that implements this frequency capping must solve several problems that would arise. First a mechanism is required to determine if a particular ad should be shown to a particular user, and secondly there must be a solution for what action to take if it is determined an ad should not show. In many cases simply not showing the ad is not an option and alternate content is required. While there are methods in place that allow an ad server to display alternate content, there is currently no method that allows the publisher to determine what that alternate content should be.